PropTech is smart real estate technology and a new must-know term in the vacation rental industry. Basically, it’s a new-age approach to selling, developing, managing, and investing in real estate. The term ‘’PropTech’’ describes the use of information technology to help drive sales and investments in real estate. The term itself stands for property technology and it means using various digital innovations to improve and address the needs within this industry.
While this term has gathered a lot of traction in the last year, the truth is that it has been around for a couple of years now. However, it’s reaching its peak as we speak, so you should use the hype surrounding this trend to take your vacation rental business to the next level. And one thing’s for sure – this trend is here to stay. Read on to find out why.
How the Digital Age Has Influenced the Vacation Rental Industry
PropTech has transformed the vacation rental industry. When you have awesome smart tools and vacation rental technology at your disposal, it is a shame not to use them to advance your business. Going digital is the only way to survive in this industry, and here’s why:
Travelers Seek Vacation Rental Properties Online
The ability to look for your own accommodation online, independently, has opened a whole new door for travelers. Holidays no longer have to involve expensive agency packages. Now, travelers are the ones who are in charge of where to stay. Instead of having to make dozens of phone calls and endless trips to their travel agent, they can book a whole stay in only a couple of clicks. If you don’t want to miss out on bookings, posting your holiday rentals online is imperative.
Digital marketing has become more aggressive
The internet, artificial intelligence, and technology, in general, have also changed how hosts market their properties. The whole commercial real estate field now uses digital marketing as the main tool to promote its offerings. The reasoning behind it is obvious:
- You can reach millions of international customers in a matter of days
- You can post images and videos of your property
- You can target your desired audience precisely
- The ability to optimize marketing campaigns based on actionable data and analytics
Analytics and digital data
We’ve briefly mentioned analytics and digital data in our previous section. However, this ability has created such a shift in how we attract and retain customers that it deserves a separate heading. The emergence of vacation rental software, for example, has enabled hosts to learn more about their guests’ habits.
Hosts are now able to quickly calculate and improve the average occupancy rate, track agent’s productivity and performance, average response time to guest inquiries, etc. You can use this data to optimize further marketing campaigns as well as your business flow.
Property Management Has Become More Complex
Because of so many available online resources, the competition is higher than it’s ever been. And, if you want to stand out from the competition, you have to offer superb service. When you combine that with the fact that hosts often have to worry about payrolls, bookings, check-ins and outs, guest communication, and team communication, among other things, it seems as though hosts always have a lot on their plate. PropTech, however, has enabled them to automate many of these mundane tasks and ensure that they have more time to focus on other important management tasks.
What Types of PropTech Solutions Are There in the Vacation Rental Industry?
PropTech companies are becoming more and more innovative. The variety of tools offered that accelerate the vacation rental industry growth have really made an impact. Software intelligence for the vacation rental industry offers a great variety of useful tools and solutions:
- Smart home gadgets – smart home gadgets will take care of most of your safety concerns. Some of the most popular smart home gadgets include smart carbon monoxide detectors, motion detectors, smart lockboxes, smart thermostats, etc.
- Data analytics tools – tools that analyze your business performance and create actionable reports which you can use to optimize your marketing, advertising, and other business efforts.
- Automation tools – automation tools can lessen the burden on your management by allowing you to focus on other important tasks at hand.
- Dynamic pricing tools – tools that allow you to customize your pricing based on different sets of criteria including time of the year, competition, local events, etc. These tools help ensure that you get the most out of each booking.
What Are the Benefits of PropTech for Vacation Rental Businesses
If you haven’t realized this by now, the PropTech trend has absolutely transformed the way property management is handled. It comes with numerous benefits, some of which include:
- Data insights
- Multi-channel and multi-platform support
- Automation
- Improved security
- Less room for human error
- Cost-effectiveness
- Time-effectiveness
- Streamlining routine operations
- Access to the vacation rental industry data and statistics
- Streamlined property management
How Can Vacation Rental Software Help Your Business?
Vacation rental software is arguably one of the most widely-used PropTech solutions. Vacation rental software has the power to improve your ROI while allowing you to make the best use of your work time. Here’s what you can do with vacation rental software in place:
- Guest messaging and communication – receive messages from multiple vacation rental platforms in a single inbox and respond to them promptly.
- Synchronize calendars – comes in handy to avoid double-bookings if you manage properties on several booking sites.
- Pricing management – automate pricing adjustment in accordance with seasonality, local events, and other factors and manage minimum stay rules.
- Team and cleaner management – keep a tidy schedule and automatically assign specific tasks to certain cleaning team members after each guest’s check-out.
- Routine tasks automation – automate regular tasks like guest messaging, guest reviews creation and send-outs, etc.
- Direct booking management – accept direct bookings and manage them as regular bookings using a direct booking toolkit.
- Enhance ROI – making your business processes more efficient will give you time to focus on other activities to boost your ROI without expanding your team
Ready to Skyrocket Your Vacation Rental Business with PropTech?
Not using Proptech for your business can cause you to fall behind your competitors. You’ll have less time to focus on business management processes and you’ll be stuck in your office overwhelmed with guest messages, creating reviews, or drafting reports on your business results.
Instead, try iGMS vacation rental software and crush your competition instantly. This software offers everything that hosts need and then some.
Sign up for free and try out our advanced features like a channel manager, unified inbox and automated messaging, cleaning and team management, payment processing, as well as guest communication productivity tracking.
